Digital Collections Outreach
Methods
- Wikipedia
- Cite back to collection/website
- Kringla
- “athons”
- Events of various durations
- Reddit AMA’s
- AMA about the Shoah foundation brought more traffic to online collections.
Private communication with stakeholders is a criterion for judging whether or not a grant should be funded. Hence, communication with stakeholders combined with project planning is key.
User evaluation before a project can sometimes be equally helpful as a user evaluation after the project.
Audience
Understanding your audience is very important
- You have to distinguish between a specific audience and the general audience.
Sometimes you don’t know who your audience is going to be so it’s best if you test it out first.
- Social media is a risk free way to send out information and see the type of audience it attracts.
- It’s also dangerous as there will be a lot of exposure and you might attract people you don’t want to.
There is an important distinction between outreach and crowd sourcing.
Purpose of Outreach
- Audience building
- Collections building
- Social media growth
- Serendipity
Word of warning with Outreach, you have to understand who you’re sending content to and be wary of copyright laws.
- Watermarking images might be a way to protect the content.
You can’t be too cautious either because otherwise it won’t be too accessible. It needs to be easily accessible online for students, teachers etc.
- If you are trying to reach a high school student or an undergrad, they won’t be too motivated to spend long hours sifting through online databases to find what they want.
Measuring outreach
- Calculating the number of Google searches.
- Sometimes the metric doesn’t make sense and obscure documents could have a large impact.
- Metrics can sometimes act as a trap
- 100 google random searches doesn’t equal one dedicated search made by an enthusiast
- How do you make meaningful decisions based on metrics?
- Outcome evaluation is very difficult as some collections gain traction through citation years after it’s initially published.
